ABSTRACT
Lung cancer is a common disease that is difficult to treat successfully. In the United States each year about 178,000 people are diagnosed with lung cancer and about 160,000 the of the disease, making it the leading cause of cancer-related mortality (Parker et al. 1997). In the UK the death rate from lung cancer is similarly high, and it is even higher in eastern Europe and Russia. Most patients have non-small cell lung cancer and the majority of them have metastatic disease-either at the time the disease is diagnosed or during the course of their illness (Ginsberg et al. 1993). Median survival is only about four months in untreated patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (Grilli et al. 1993).
